Dead Silence

Ventriloquist dolls are creepy, right? That’s essentially the entire concept behind Dead Silence, a horror film directed by James Wan. Those familiar with the horror scene should know Wan by name - he hit it big as the director and co-writer of the original Saw, and produced the rest of the series. While the Saw films might be considered passé at this point (Paranormal Activity-styled found footage flicks seem to be the more popular trend these days) at the time the series completely changed the landscape for horror filmmaking by popularising the torture porn genre.

More recently Wan hit it real big (both commercially and critically) with two horror hits, Insidious and The Conjuring, which betrayed Wan’s true passion and skill – building creepy atmosphere and tension in haunted house movies. And he’s really good at it too – Insidious and The Conjuring are both great haunted house movies. But before those films, in the tender refractory period after the explosive success of Saw, Wan weakly pumped out two films – Dead Silence and Death Sentence. The latter film is an alright and mostly overlooked revenge thriller where Kevin Bacon hunts down and massacres the men who killed his son. But today we’re talking about the former.

Dead Silence is an oddity, and feels like an odd misstep for a breakout director unsure of where to go. It also shows a director trying new things – the ideas and filmmaking here are almost completely the opposite with what was seen in Saw. It’s the early inklings of a director trying new things and shaking out the bad ideas - this was the groundwork that lead to Insidious and The Conjuring being so good. As such, the film itself is not great. There are some decent ideas, but the execution isn't quite up to snuff. It’s a movie that doesn’t have anything under the creepy surface. It’s hollow, much like the dolls it concerns itself with. It also happens to be a massive rip-off of Freddy Kreuger and his entire backstory from the Nightmare on Elm Street movies.

 

Jamie Ashen (Ryan Kwanten), living happily with his loving young wife, mysteriously receives a ventriloquist doll in a package delivered to his house, sent from his home town of Ravens Fair. By the end of the evening his wife is found dead with her tongue torn out. The police think Jamie is responsible, but due to a lack of evidence they can’t arrest him. Jamie, shocked and horrified by the death, finds out that the doll belonged to infamous, long-dead ventriloquist Mary Shaw, also hailing from Ravens Fair.

So Jamie returns to Ravens Fair to bury his wife and find out who sent him the doll – he believes the culprit must be the killer. His investigation leads him to look into the legend of Mary Shaw; famed for her talent, she had a collection of over a hundred puppets and was obsessed with creating a ‘perfect doll’. When a local boy went missing, the townsfolk accused and killed Mary, who – as stipulated in her will – was then turned into a ventriloquist doll herself and buried along with the rest of her dolls. As Jamie begins to look into the grisly truth behind Mary Shaw, he’s pursued by Lipton, the detective who believes Jamie killed his own wife.

There’s not much else to say here since that’s basically the entire movie. A big fault with the film is the complete lack of meat or depth to the film. There is no real mystery there – once Jamie gets to Ravens Fair he pretty much instantly learns that Mary Shaw’s ghost is responsible. The rest of the movie is just delving into why the ghastly spectre is doing what she’s doing. The characters are all bland and lack anything interesting and even the investigation into Mary Shaw is mostly devoid of excitement or chills. It’s mostly all exposition until the end, where an encounter with Shaw’s ghost in her creepy abandoned theatre feels completely ridiculous and out of place.

The town of Ravens Fair feels like a half-formed idea – a sleepy town with aged, gothic architecture. The concept is tired, and though Mary Shaw’s dilapidated theatre is a fun location in theory it never feels solid. CGI trickery was used to pull off the size and scale of the place, but it all looks and feels fake. It’s not helped by confining a lot of the film in drab locales – we keep returning to a seedy motel room and a mortician’s office. The film also feels empty in terms of people – Ravens Fair is a ghost town. It makes sense in terms of plot, but it’s baffling that there only seems to be four people total in the entire place.

This is a horror film with old school ‘rules’ to the horror. ‘Rules’ are a tough concept to nail – to work they need to be interesting, make sense within the story and absolutely never obstruct the pace or flow of the film. Some pull it off well (the original Nightmare on Elm Street’s dream-based rules for Freddy are pretty much perfect). Most films fail by having nonsense, inconsistent rules that seem conveniently made up on the spot (like in pretty much every Nightmare on Elm Street sequel). Dead Silence actually has pretty decent rules in concept, but it never capitalises on them leading to many missed horror opportunities.

When Mary Shaw appears, all other sounds cease – its dead silence as the title suggests. It’s honestly a unique, cinematic idea but the film doesn’t pull it off. For the most part you won’t actually notice the sudden turn to silence (though watching the film in a room full of people probably doesn’t help). The other big rule, that really doesn’t get much attention, is that Mary Shaw only kills you if you scream, at which point she rips your tongue out and steals your voice. This is a missed opportunity as they don’t use it for anything interesting. It’s not helped by the fact that there are only four deaths in the entire movie.

It’s all very much a ‘Freddy Krueger’ scenario, with the vengeful ghost of Mary Shaw slaughtering everyone related to those who killed her in revenge. She even has her own creepy (if not forced) children’s rhyme that details how she gets her victims. A common trend in Wan’s horror films is his odd obsession with dolls. There’s the doll mascot in the Saw films, the dolls here and even The Conjuring started with a scene that had nothing to do with the plot regarding a creepy, possibly haunted doll (an opening scene apparently so popular it spawned its own film, ‘Annabelle’).

Dead Silence is just a strange film in the state it’s in. Its ideas are decent, but underdeveloped, its atmosphere only half formed. The concepts are decent, but they just aren’t solid and their execution is lacking. It needed a stronger screenplay with more interesting characters and a stronger narrative. The frustrating part is that it’s not an awful film – on a technical viewpoint the film is quite well made, it’s just sadly lacking. Still, watching it you can see some of the seeds that would lead to Wan’s next big hit Insidious.